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Back from a quasi-week in foreign climes, I return to discover Eurogamer has published some writing they recklessly hired me to write. There’s a preview of Assassin’s Creed 2, detailing what I found when I nosed at the first couple of hours of the game, and perhaps more interestingly, there’s my review of Torchlight. In it, I claim that absolutely everything Walker said it about the game here was embarrassingly wrong and that we should all fire cannonballs at his face. Or did I largely agree with him? I forget. Let’s fire cannonballs at him anyway. There was also supposed to be a preview of Avatar up there, but it has mysteriously not arrived. I’ll have a little cry until it does.

22 Comments

Zombies are alright I guess. Does the cat treat them like mobile litter boxes too? And I liked the scowling monks. I suppose a little humour won’t go astray but I’m sure going to miss the Holy Land.

Aside: I’ve given up hope of Blizzard ever releasing another game besides more WoW expansions. Remember how people were comparing how Starcraft II would compare to Dawn of War 2. It was going to be the RTS fight of the century! That was February.

“It’s a game that really, really wants you to kill a lot of stuff. But I did get bored. The idea of playing it again now is almost sickening to me, after the absurd binge of the last few days – but I’m quite sure I’ll come back to it, most of all because developer Runic is planning to expand it from its current single-player form into a quasi-MMO, and to add a glut of modding options to further ensure every player sees and kills different things.”

I think your review of torchlight is pretty much spot on. It's great, if overly focused. I really enjoy it and think it's a fantastic game, but I also very strictly ration it for when I just want to zone out for an hour to the bliss of short term reward. I think it works best that way. :)

Plus -my- cat summons swords. Maybe one day the ability to combine spells into super spells will be modded in and my cat can summon zombie swords that infect enemies and turn THEM into zombie swords. One day.

I accidentally turned my cat permanently into a lightning elemental, oops. But I agree about only playing it for an hour or so at a time. It’s actually great for those nights when you wake up at 3am for no reason and need something brainless to do to keep yourself occupied.

I’m not exactly sure what you think is wrong with improving and modernizing something people clearly enjoy. Your posts to me seem somewhat like, “Starcraft 2 – what’s the point? I didn’t even like Dune 2.”

I think the best part about Torchlight is that it is essentially the equivalent of loading up a browser to play a quick casual web game, except it is a lot more fun, and incredibly well done. I can see myself playing this for years simply because it is so easy to hop into for minutes at a time, just as easy to hop on for minutes and play for hours as Meer has said in the article. Hopefully there are some solid mod additions to a more horizontal experience like Titan Quest, because like someone said on the previous thread, it does give the impression of going somewhere, where Torchlight just goes down, down, down. Maybe that’s the whole point though, you’re only ever 1 hotkey away from being safe and able to log out, and you don’t ever have to worry about Waypoints at all (I mean what is the point of those?).

After reading all these comments about how easy the game is. I am nerfing my character on purpose. I have made a alchemist, and I use pistols. Almost all my points are to upgrade my dog and some imps that I can supposedly summon, but theres a bug (?) and I can summon these.

If you play on Hard, and don’t spam enchanting, the game will retain it’s fun. Some people have been spamming enchants on low level items, and getting ridiculous stuff. So like, a level 3 axe with 24 enchantments, it’s kinda fun to test out but a bit of a game breaker though, so be warned!

I’ve been playing it and, well, it’s fun for a bit, but I’m starting to get disappointed by it. The graphics are quite nice and it has a few nice features that make things easier, but it really is exactly Diablo 2, isn’t it? With less interesting skills or weapons and no multiplayer.

I mean, I liked Diablo 2 but it has some major flaws that I hoped this game would improve upon. The skill system for one really hasn’t aged well. I would think that with the benefit of hindsight we could come up with something much better. But Torchlight has the same system, only a bit worse.

Of course, it’s possible that I’m just expecting too much from a $20 game leading to an MMO. The graphics are quite nice.